A visual query such as a photograph, a screen shot, a scanned image, a video frame, or an image created by a content authoring application is submitted to a visual query search system. The search system processes the visual query by sending it to a plurality of parallel search systems, each implementing a distinct visual query search process. These parallel search systems may include but are not limited to optical character recognition (OCR), facial recognition, product recognition, bar code recognition, object-or-object-category recognition, named entity recognition, and color recognition. Then at least one search result is sent to the client system. In some embodiments, when the visual query is an image containing a text element and a non-text element, at least one search result includes an optical character recognition result for the text element and at least one image-match result for the non-text element.